VHL Community: Is Relegation/Promotion a System You Would Like To See in VHL?

[fromtheinside 1,289]

Hello fellow VHL members! The other day I was brainstorming and just generally trying to come up with ideas/solutions to the constant and ongoing issue with balancing leagues and rosters across all three leagues in the VHL family. Things are always in a constant state of flux and it's extremely hard to come up with a "perfect solution" to perfectly balance everything. Currently the VHLM is bottlenecked full of players.  This comes of the heels of us sending two VHLM teams to the VHL E to expand that league instead. While it seemed necessary to expand the E, thanks to a very successful recruitment drive and YouTube ad recently, we find ourselves (thankfully) with a ton of new blood in the league again. The thing is though, there won't consistently be such a high userbase of players in the M year in and year out, so expansion isn't necessarily the solution. 

 

An option that's been discussed is using the Juniors as a fallback system if necessary to deal with overflow in the M.  Many newer users won't even know what the Juniors system is since we've never used it since the idea was implemented about four or five seasons ago. Essentially each VHLM team has a "junior team:, essentially a farm team. Excess players would play on those teams until spots open up on the VHLM rosters.  This only would happen if we hit a threshold of 75% of VHLM teams being a full roster size. It's never happened up til now, but if I'm being honest I am not a huge fan of the system. There would be an extremely limited number of players who would be in Juniors and I feel the experience for these people would be pretty alienating. You would be on a separate roster from everyone else on your M team, and you would be mostly playing with bots. It just doesn't seem ideal.

 

I thought, what about a relegation/promotion system. I'm not really sure on the details, but at its core it would just serve as a tool to move teams where needed on a per season basis. If there's a large recruitment drive on the horizon and we know the M might get an influx of new players, the league could announce that two teams from the E are going to be relegated to the M. And then when things balance back out down the road, you could say okay "X amount of teams will be promoted to the E". Basically use it to help make room for wherever the bottleneck of players is, whether that be the M, the E or the VHL.  I'd also be interested to hear what people think of relegation/promotion even as a standalone idea. The idea of having something on the line, in my opinion, adds a lot more intrigue to the league which is great. 

 

Anyways it was literally just a random thought I had the other day, I would just be interested in what people think, even if you think it's a bad idea I'd like the feedback. I needed some extra TPE so I figured I would throw this out here and see what people's thoughts were at least. Cheers.

[Beketov 8,939]

Not at all in my opinion. On paper it may sound like a clean solution but it presents a major problem in practice: where do the players go? Moving the teams this season was easy because they basically had no assets anyway but VHLE teams will keep their players for a season or two most likely so where are those players supposed to go if their team just gets tossed in the VHLM? They can’t play down there as they are too high of TPE and we can’t realistically redistribute two rosters worth of players every season.

 

It just doesn’t sound just a logistically solid plan to me.

[CowboyinAmerica 2,840]

It's definitely not practical and will never happen in the VHL for the reasons Bek said. But I think it'd be fun, just to see how it operates. Would probably need to be one of those things you're implementing from the start of a league, so everybody knows what they're getting into and can buy in from the start.

[Spartan 4,274]

This proposal isn't even how "relegation/promotion" really works. That system says that teams that play well move up, while teams that play poorly get bumped down. An even number of teams would move in both directions which wouldn't help the situation here.

 

I think your idea is just saying to flex teams up/down on an ad hoc basis, which seems to be how we're already treating the situation with the recent move of Minny/Yukon. However, it does need to line up well as Bek said, since moving teams who have traded assets are a nightmare to work with, especially with draft picks and rostered players. I don't think that's as flexible as we'd need it to be.

[Shindigs 1,771]

Draft picks and relegation are in essence two different ways to do the same thing. Relegation removes the worst team from the league. Draft picks reward the worst teams with better picks to hopefully stop them being the worst teams. But it is very much a "pick one, but only one" type of deal. Because as Spartan pointed out, you can't be able to trade draft picks if the team you trade them to can leave the league. Drafting requires a close system, but relegation isn't a closed system.

 

Also as a Swede where everything is a relegation league, I can tell you it's a bit of a tire fire most the time. It leads to massive instability in the franchises. It does mean that the bottom teams who are just "playing out the season" in a closed system are instead fighting for their lives. But usually they are bad enough that it doesn't make any actual difference, and instead makes it so 7 game series will decide if their franchise almost dies or not.

 

The junior system sounds like the absolute worst case scenario of what Gus was advocating against in the jardy podcast Opinion thread though. So would agree that's probably not the solution. Arguably if the league ends up in a position where the M gets completely clogged, that seems like a good time to consider the possibility of letting the capped recreates move up to the E during a season. Simply to open up roster spots as needed in the M.